GLENBURNIE – Faced with the prospect of being left with an incomplete project, Frontenac County council decided Thursday to borrow money to finish the last section of the K&P Trail south of Sharbot Lake.

As part of its 2019 budget discussions, council OK’d an idea to provide $250,000 from reserves and borrow up to $250,000 to complete the work.

The money would be borrowed from Infrastructure Ontario and paid off $30,000 a year for the next nine years.

In the past decade, Frontenac County spent $3.7 million – including more than $1.7 million of federal gas tax revenue – during the past decade to extend the trail north from the Kingston city limits.

The remaining work poses the biggest challenges the county has experienced in building the trail, but at the same time it is work that has to be completed to make the route whole.

“It’s complicated,” Richard Allen, manager of economic development, said of the remaining work. “We have to go around two houses, across a watercourse, up a hill and through a swamp. But it is critical off-road infrastructure to ensure we have a complete trail.”

Last year, Allen estimated that more than $654,000 would be needed to complete the work.

In previous years, the county was able to access grants from upper-tier governments to fund trail work, but Allen said most of those sources are not longer available.

Some, like Canada 150 funding, were one-time grants. Others, like Trans Canada Trail funding, can’t be used on trails that are to be used by motorized vehicles. Some county reserves that had been used in the past have been depleted.

“Where we’ve been paying the trail from, there’s not a lot left to access right now,” Allen told county council on Thursday. “There could be other sources that come along.”

Work on the trail ground to a halt last year 1.5 kilometres south of Sharbot Lake, where the route deviated from the existing railway bed, which up to then had provided a solid, available base on which to build.

In total, Allen budgeted $338,000 in 2019 for trail-related projects, including $250,000 to finish the route to Sharbot Lake, $25,000 worth of repairs to a bridge across Elbow Creek, a $50,000 engineering study to look at extending the trail north of Sharbot Lake, and $10,000 worth of upgrades to the trailhead at Verona.

But after a decade of spending money on the trail, a plan to finish the trail to Sharbot Lake is what county councillors wanted to see.

Council voted to repair the Elbow Creek bridge but shelved the engineering study and the Verona trailhead work.

“The priority has to be to get this section done,” Frontenac Islands Mayor Denis Doyle said. “I was on the trails committee back in the beginning, at least 10 years ago, and we always wanted to get to Sharbot Lake and then look at North Frontenac and the islands.”

“The $250,000 is critical to finish this thing that we started a long time ago,” South Frontenac Mayor Ron Vandewal said. “If we don’t finish it, it is really just a useless piece of infrastructure.